The
OpenStack community today released Pike, the 16th version of the most
widely deployed open source infrastructure software, with a focus on
manageability, composability and scale. The software now powers 60
public cloud availability zones and more than a thousand private clouds
running across more than five million physical cores.

With
new delivery models like private-cloud-as-a-service, it's easier than
ever to adopt OpenStack through the open source ecosystem where users
are not locked into a proprietary technology or single vendor.
OpenStack's modular architecture also allows you to pick the
functionality you need-whether that's bare metal or block storage
provisioning-to plug into your infrastructure stack. This
composability-which makes possible use cases like edge computing and
NFV-is a marked distinction from proprietary on-premises offerings, or
even earlier versions of OpenStack.

Community trends and statistics:

Composable
services are gaining ground to address new use cases like containers
and edge computing. For example, OpenStack Ironic bare metal service now
features enhanced integration for Cinder block storage and Neutron
networking, and Cinder can now act as a standalone storage service for
virtual machines, bare metal, or containers using Docker or Kubernetes.

Significant
development efforts have gone into lifecycle management tools including
OpenStack Kolla, which makes it easier to manage and upgrade OpenStack
using services like Kubernetes and Ansible. Kolla saw an 19 percent
increase in contributors in the Pike release as compared to the Ocata
release.

More
OpenStack users are adopting a multi-cloud strategy and placing
workloads across public and private cloud environments based on cost,
compliance and capabilities. According to the April 2017 user survey,
vendor lock-in was the number one business driver for OpenStack clouds,
and 38 percent of OpenStack deployments interact with at least one other
public or private cloud environment.

OpenStack
is continuing to experience strong growth with the April 2017 user
survey reporting 44 percent more deployments compared to the previous
year and new at-scale production deployments in Europe and China at
China UnionPay, Paddy Power Betfair and Tencent, which uses OpenStack to
power WeChat.

OVH is only the latest player to expand its OpenStack public cloud footprint into Poland. Recently, Swedish provider City Network added a region in Dubai; Telefonica added
regions in Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Chile and Peru; and Fujitsu
announced it has 16 OpenStack public cloud availability zones around the
world.

*** Download Pike and learn more, including details on features and enhancements here. ***

"The
features and upgrades that Pike brings are the lessons of experience
you get from enabling thousands of public and private clouds, large and
small, for seven-plus years," said Jonathan Bryce, executive director of
the OpenStack Foundation. "The rise of composable services and simpler
consumption options are part of that maturation process. Our community
is now focused on eliminating future technical debt as well as growing
OpenStack's capabilities to support ever-expanding use cases."

Nova Cells v2: The
Nova Cells architecture supports large deployments and scaling the
compute service. Version 2 allows operators to shard their deployments
to help with scaling the database and message queue, as well as
segregate failure domains and help eliminate single points of failure.

Python 3.5 upgrade:
Working across all projects, the community introduced support for
Python 3.5 to be ready for Python 2.x end-of-life in 2020 and also to
take advantage of new features and increased performance in the future.

Leveragingetcd: At
the Forum in Boston, the user and developer communities decided to use
etcd v3 as the distributed lock management solution for OpenStack, and
integrations are starting to appear in the Pike release.

Ironic bare metal service matures: Ironic
continues to mature in the Pike release with the ability to plug into
Neutron networks for true multi-tenancy. Ironic also joins Cinder,
Neutron, Nova and Swift as projects that support rolling upgrades,
letting operators roll out new code without interrupting service.

Cinder launches ‘revert to snapshot' and ability to extend volumes: Revert
to snapshot lets users recover from things like data corruption, or to
reset after running tests. Users can also now extend storage volumes
without shutting down virtual machines, keeping applications online
during extensions.

Swift object storage lands globally distributed erasure codes: Even
if the cross-region network is down, individual regions can still
function, and failures in one region can use the remote region to
recover. Swift also added performance improvements by enabling users to
run multiple concurrent processes per server.